Yesterday’s posting concentrated on the multiple entries into the Festive 50 of 1989, and those of you who are half-decent at arithmetic will have worked out that 27 acts managed to get enough votes to muster a place in the rundown.
Some of these were very well-known acts with some of their best-known and best-loved songs, with perhaps the best examples being found in the higher echelons of the festive rundown – Happy Mondays with Wrote For Luck (#4), James with Sit Down (#7), House Of Love with I Don’t Know Why I Love You (#10), Dinosaur Jr with Just Like Heaven (#12) and The Jesus And Mary Chain with Blues From A Gun (#13). They’ve all been featured on the blog before, and so it is the next few bands in the rundown that I want to shine a light on.
mp3 : Cud – Only (A Prawn In Whitby) (#15)
There are others out there way more qualified than me to wax lyrically about Cud. They’re another band of whom I own very little but anytime I’ve eavesdropped in on an offering on a blog, I’ve found myself nodding my head in appreciation.
They had been kicking around for a couple of years having released a handful of singles and recorded a Peel Session, before debut album When In Rome, Kill Me was released in June 1989. The seven songs on side one of the album are linked by short narratives thus, sort of, forming a single story in which the main character runs away from Whitby to Rome to try and escape the long arm of the law. From the one time I’ve actually heard the entire album, it seemed to me to be far from an over-blown concept record and indeed seemed to be taking the piss out of such records so loved by the prog-rock fraternity. The track featured today was based on an alleged encounter with Morrissey in which the vegetarian was supposed to have been spotted wolfing down a prawn in a café in Whitby….but in all likelihood not true.
The only other band with a single entry into the Top 20 were American grunge combo Mudhoney at #16 with You Got It (Keep It Out Of My Face).
The lower part of the chart was festooned with great tracks which still endure to this day, including these which should be familiar to you either via this or other great blogs:-
808 State – Pacific State (#22)
Field Mice – Sensitive (#26)
New Order – Vanishing Point (#27)
Spaceman 3 – Hypnotised (#33)
De La Soul –Eye Know (#34)
Dub Sex – Swerve (#39)
And then, like Convenience by BOB which started all this off, there’s a handful which may well need some prompting but are more than worthy of a listen. Here’s three today, with a similar number to follow tomorrow:-
mp3 : The Telescopes – The Perfect Needle (#30)
mp3 : Senseless Things – Too Much Kissing (#42)
mp3 : The Family Cat – Tom Verlaine (#48)
THE NEW VINYL VILLAIN 